Someone who reads my blog has asked me to share the recipe for Gulliver’s Creamed Spinach. Here is the recipe, directly from the same book as the Gulliver’s Creamed Corn, that I blogged about just yesterday: Dear S.O.S.:30 Years of Recipe Requests to the Los Angeles Times, by Rose Dosti (from the Los Angeles Times). According to the blurb in the book, The Times first published the recipe in 1974. [November, 2011: my hubby and I had dinner at Gulliver’s and I took photos of the two veggies – they were just as good as I remembered – I took the pictures with my iPhone and brightened them up a bit with Photoshop.]

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If you’ve never had Gulliver’s corn. . . Well, what can I say. You’re missing out. Uh, yea, missing out on a whole lot of calories and fat, I suppose. But missing out on undoubtedly the best creamy corn you’re ever gonna eat. We’re lucky to still HAVE a Gulliver’s Restaurant here in the county where I live. Although I can’t say that I’ve been there for at least 4+ years. They do make some mighty fine prime rib. But it’s the corn – only the corn – that I’d go there for – just to have seconds.

The recipe was printed in the Los Angeles Times Food Section, back in the 1970’s. I’ve made it dozens of times since. I can remember, really I can, the day it appeared in the Times. My face lit up like a lightbulb. I never thought I’d get the recipe! What’s funny is that it’s nothing fancy. No unusual ingredients – just rich cream, a little sugar and Parmesan cheese on top. And likely, back in the 70’s it was that green canned Parmesan, not the real thing.

It’s a staple at Thanksgiving dinner for some dear friends of ours (yes, Maggie, that’s you!). They hosted our family many a holiday and I made a triple batch to serve the multitudes on one of them. When I went to look for the recipe today, it wasn’t there, so I turned to a book, given to me by a dear friend, Linda T., when she worked at the Times. She was the outside sales rep for the Times, we were the customer, our ad agency, Ad Masters. Linda kindly brought me a Rose Dosti autographed copy of the book in 1994, when it was published. Dear SOS was the column in each week’s Food Section with requests from readers for “special” recipes, or more often, ones from popular restaurants, bakeries, even some dives, in and around Southern California. Restaurants like the Brown Derby, Chasen’s, Benihana, Bullock’s, Clifton’s (a venerable old cafeteria), El Cholo, Lawry’s, Love’s Barbecue, Marrakesh, and the Velvet Turtle. Dear S.O.S.:30 Years of Recipe Requests to the Los Angeles Times, by Rose Dosti. It’s a treasured book in my collection; one I refer to occasionally. It’s particularly fun to see the restaurants mentioned in it, many no longer in business. The book was printed just once in 1994- it’s long out of print. I was so pleased to get one. In doing a Google search, ebay has one for $12.99 plus shipping. In case you always wanted one.

Back in those days I took different clients of our ad agency on a tour of the Times, probably about twice a year. It was a perk for our clients – the management at the Times would kindly entertain the client, the actual advertiser – we were just the middle man, the encourager, the ad writers and designers. (Because then, and even today when newspaper advertising is down, the Times charges an arm and a leg to advertise.) The tour included a lovely lunch in their executive dining room (not open to the public, not even to most employees). In taking the tour, we always walked past the test kitchen. It was all enclosed, with a big window. And a wide shade. In all the years (17), only once was I able to peek in the kitchen – the shade was UP. But alas, nobody was in there. No tasty goodies being prepared. No Rose Dosti popping in or out of an office or door. I’d heard stories about the aromas wafting in and out of the halls. Oh well.

So this recipe came from that book, and I am sure it’s an authentic one pried from the owners of Gulliver’s. Otherwise it wouldn’t be in the book under the Gulliver’s name. Gulliver’s Creamed Spinach is on the same page. Also very good. But it’s the Creamed Corn that is a favorite around our house. Made only on very, very special occasions. And although the recipe indicates it serves 8-10 people, if you have hearty eaters, or people who like seconds (ah-hem) this won’t feed but about 6-7 people is my guess. [November, 2011: I updated the photo at top – my hubby and I went there for dinner – so I took some photos with my iPhone and fiddled with them using Photoshop – the veggies were just as good as ever although I am certain they make their corn with frozen corn. There was no way it was fresh off the cob. Nor could I taste even a smidgen of Parmesan cheese. ? ? ?]
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Do you run out of oven space on holidays? Especially Thanksgiving? Fortunately, I have 2 regular ovens AND a microwave/convection oven too. When we remodeled our kitchen a year ago we put in 2 ovens. They are just 27″ wide, so the two turkeys took up both regular ovens with no room to spare for side dishes. We baked yeast bread in the small convection oven an hour or so before dinner, and heated up one of the vegetable dishes in the microwave.

Making mashed potatoes at the last minute is not my idea of fun cooking on Thanksgiving. Recently a friend mentioned that she keeps mashed potatoes in her crockpot for holiday dinners. What a great idea, I thought. She said, as long as your potato recipe has a goodly amount of fat (butter, sour cream or something), the potatoes will hold for hours. I’m here to tell you the technique works like a charm. I’ll be doing this year after year after year.

Again, I turned to Rick Rodgers’ book, Thanksgiving 101, and he has a “Make Ahead Mashed Potato Casserole” in the 1998 edition. His are baked, but I used the recipe with just one substitution, then piled the 10 pounds of mashed potato mixture into the large crockpot. [I made a double batch.] The recipe below is for 5 pounds of potatoes. I have a very old crockpot – with a ceramic insert. It has the high, low and auto settings, but it’s big. Good thing since we filled the pot to the brim with potatoes. These can’t be called healthy in any way, but this was Thanksgiving, after all. I didn’t skimp – I used full fat cream cheese, and full fat sour cream. Were they good? Abso-posi-tutely, as my dad used to say. I’m looking forward to all the leftovers for tonight’s dinner. The pumpkin pie is gone and the broccoli with Hollandaise is gone, but we have lots of the other stuff: the super-moist kosher turkey, dressing, green beans, broccoli/leek puree, gravy AND mashed potatoes!
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Files: MasterCook 5+ and MasterCook 14 (click link to open MC – 14 contains photo)

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For Thanksgving, we had 3 vegetable side dishes, plus dressing and mashed potatoes. This was one of the three vegetables. A recipe I hadn’t made before, and I loved it. Very simple. And fairly low in fat besides. I wouldn’t exactly call it purely healthy, but there are only 11 grams of fat per serving. Not too bad.

I’ve mentioned before that I use MasterCook 9 for my recipe software. It was developed by Sierra products, but now is owned by a company that doesn’t provide much customer service or support. So, a couple of years ago when I was working toward printing my own cookbook, I needed more help than the help screens were offering. I found a message board kind of place, a Yahoo group, where I could post questions and get really helpful answers for some of my complicated cookbook problems. (FYI: I never did print the cookbook, having decided to start this blog instead.) In reading the boards I discovered a site that offers recipes already formatted in MasterCook (another Yahoo group called MC Taste_Tested), so it’s a very easy thing to import them into my program. People from all over the country load recipes there every day. It got to be too much reading, though, so have since stopped receiving the compilation every day. But this recipe came from that source, and I have no idea to whom I owe the credit. Doing a Google search provided nothing with the same or similar name. So, I tip my hat to some unknown person who uploaded this recipe.

This can be made ahead with no difficulty, and heated up in the microwave if you’re short on time. The original recipe is just warmed on the stovetop, but I didn’t want to do that for our Thanksgiving dinner. So I just put it into a oil-sprayed baking dish, refrigerated it overnight, then heated in the microwave for about 4-5 minutes, with platic wrap intact. DH liked this vegetable the best.
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I do believe, if I say so myself, that this was far and away the best stuffing/dressing I’ve ever made. I used to buy Pepperidge Farms package cubes, and started from that relatively mild slate and made it my own with additions, etc., but this time I decided to veer way off the traditional path. Last Thanksgiving I made Rachel Ray’s apple and onion stuffin’ muffins. They were good. Very good, actually, but the taste didn’t wow me. I didn’t want apples this time, which gives dressing a real sweet taste. I did like the convenience of baking them in a muffin tin – they can be heated up in a jiffy, so you pop them into the oven when you take the turkey out to rest before you slice it up to serve. And by the time you are ready to serve, the stuffin’ muffins are done.

I could have used the same muffin style, I suppose, even with this version, but it seemed easier to just make it in a big pan because of serving 16 people. (FYI: I made a double batch, so baked it in a 9×13 pan.) For the last few years I’ve been buying kosher turkeys. And generally they are too salty to put dressing in the bird itself. So since I discovered this super-wonderful-juicy turkey preparation, I’ve been baking the dressing outside the bird.

I wanted dressing with Italian sausage this year. So I turned to my favorite Thanksgiving cookbook, Thanksgiving 101 by Rick Rodgers. (As a side note, the photo at left is of Rodgers’ new 2007 revised edition – I have a 1998 edition). Sure enough, I found a recipe titled Italian Stuffing with Sausage and Parmesan Cheese. I took some liberties with Rodgers’ recipe, so I can’t exactly give him full credit. Part of it is mine, and part thanks to Trader Joe’s. I bought Trader Joe’s boxed dry stuffing/dressing mix. I added many of the ingredients in Rodgers’ recipe, then I added my own minor changes. So here’s what it is: onion, celery (lots), bell peppers, garlic, hot Italian sausage, thyme, oregano, Trader Joe’s seasoning packet, some Parmesan cheese, butter and chicken stock. We have some left over, along with some gravy. Delish that will be.
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One of the things that deters me from buying whole butternut squash is the difficulty of cutting it (first), the yukkiness of scooping out and discarding the seeds and strings (second), scraping that stringy stuff away from the inner hollow (third) and lastly, the slicing or dicing of the hard squash itself (fourth). So when I spotted fresh pre-cut butternut squash at Costco last week, I bought two 2-pound bags. Some of it went into a soup I made last week, and the balance was made into butternut fries.

Normally, “fries” ought to be long wedges, but I had cubes. That didn’t deter me one bit. I snooped around the internet a little bit and found a few recipes (I just did a google search for butternut squash fries). I kind of used my own imagination. Rachael Ray’s online magazine had a recipe that used maple syrup and creme fraiche, plus lime juice plus some seasonings. I took ideas from the few recipes I did find, and here’s what I did: I tossed the cubes with olive oil, and sprinkled them all over with a mixture of ground cumin, garlic salt and some mild chile powder (I used Chimayo). The squash went into a relatively hot oven (425) and baked for about 45-60 minutes. I thought they’d be done in about 40, so tasted it. Disappointment at that point. I’m SO glad I left them to bake another 10-15 minutes because they became succulent, a bit crispy on the outside edges, and those said edges had begun to caramelize with their own natural sugars. In that short time they became magic. Amazing how baking chemistry works. These are remarkably easy. If you prefer more sweetness to them, by all means sprinkle them with some brown sugar, or try maple syrup. But it’s not needed, I assure you.
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Improvise. That’s the word of the day. I had a head of cauliflower and hadn’t decided what I’d do with it. Remembering how wonderful the twice-baked cauliflower is that I posted a few months ago, I looked at the list of ingredients and didn’t have everything. When I made it months ago I’d adapted it from the recipe over at Kalyn’s Kitchen. This time I had about 1/3 cup of sour cream, but no Parmesan. I had about 2 ounces of cream cheese, but no green onions. So, I improvized. The mother of invention, so they say.

This is the dish that is kind of like mashed potatoes, but it’s made with cauliflower. You mash it up, kind of like you would with mashed potatoes, but it’s not as smooth. Then you add in the fixins, like bacon, sour cream, etc. What I did have was: bacon, a tad of cream cheese, a bit of butter, and buttermilk (I often add buttermilk to my mashed potatoes, so my thinking went along that this would be a good addition to cauliflower too). So, here’s an adjunct recipe for twice-baked cauliflower. You can use whatever cheese you have – I happened to have a nutty, but mild white cheese with truffles in it. I hadn’t planned on cooking with this cheese, but it was beginning to grow some mold on the outside, so figured I’d best use it pronto. It was delicious. We had seconds it was so good.
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Until 15 years or so ago I didn’t know much of anything about paprika, really, except that I had a can of it on my shelf. Then I read somewhere about how paprika gets bugs if the can is left on your spice shelf. I opened my can, and oh my. Yuck. And I learned that paprika is supposed to be stored in the refrigerator all the time. Hmmmpf. My frig is already so full, I hated to add to its abundance of jars and bottles that tell me to “Refrigerate after opening.” Sigh. Oh well. I bought a good can of “Hungarian Paprika” at the gourmet supermarket (see larger can in photo below). I’ve had it for some years; it lives in the refrigerator, and has been just fine. But the can is getting low.

As luck would have it, we’re going on a trip in a few weeks, and I’ll be in Hungary, so I’ll definitely stock up on paprika while I’m there. Only problem with buying it there is that the labels are in Hungarian, naturally. I don’t speak that language, sorry to say. I bought a couple of small containers the last time I was in Budapest and when I opened them up at home, I found it was something else altogether. Paprika based, a paprika seasoning for making paprikash, but not pure paprika. Hopefully when we’re in Budapest, I’ll find a store and they’ll speak enough English that I can buy replacements. There is a very large spice market in Budapest, right on the river, so I hope to stop there and will find what I need.

Here’s the paprika I currently have living in my refrigerator. I use them a lot, actually. A few years ago I attended a cooking class at Sur la Table and the chef used Spanish Smoked Paprika (the smaller can). It was an eye-opening wake up of my taste buds. Loved it. It definitely has a smoky taste. I also have a jar of half-sharp paprika too (oops, I forgot to photograph that one) which I use sometimes. Hungarians use lots of paprika in their cuisine, and they like it in all guises and strengths of mild to hot. But they tend toward the hot. So, the half-sharp (half-hot) is about my speed.

When I was making cooked cabbage, and the recipe called for paprika, I gathered my myriad paprikas and “had at it.” This was a recipe from my friend, Karen B, from her archives. It just sounded good, and it is. We like cabbage, but I tend to make it the same-old-way, with bacon, onions, vinegar or maybe apple in it.

This is a bit different – with green onions, carrot and beef broth. Since I had some diced pancetta in the refrigerator, I decided to add that to the mixture too. Grating it was too much trouble, so I just diced them. I used young carrots anyway, so that wasn’t difficult. This dish comes together quickly, once you have all the ingredients ready to go. It made a great accompaniment to grilled Italian sausages for our dinner. Here’s a photo of the onions and pancetta cooking away.
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Fennel. Fresh fennel, in the bulb. I think I first had it in about 1985, served to me by a friend. She and her husband are Italian, and she shaved thin pieces into a green salad. I was blown away by the taste, asked her about it, and have been using it ever since. I buy a fennel bulb every week or so and usually it’s reserved for salads, in small little slivers. I rarely take the time to shave the fennel with a potato peeler to get the paper-thin type I was originally served. I even enjoy munching on raw fennel too. It’s like celery, but with more flavor. The hint of anise in fennel is very subtle.And my friend Joan brought some fabulous Baked Fennel with Parmigiano-Reggiano one time to an Italian meal we shared with travel friends when we were heading for a trip to Tuscany together. I’ve written up that recipe already – click on the title in the previous sentence to get to it. But, other than that dish, I’ve not had it cooked. Until now, that is.

I don’t remember where I was referred to the blog, Rustic Food, or just “Rustic.” But Batul lives in England and uploads some very interesting recipes now and then. A recipe has not been posted since January, however, so Batul must be on hiatus. The recipes are different, with lots of Middle Eastern overtones. This one is no exception. Fennel Fritters. They sounded so unusual. I printed out the recipe nearly a year ago, but just made them to accompany a grilled steak for our dinner. My DH loved them. I loved them.

Here you see what the diced up fennel and onion looked like. I did this by hand, so I could control the size better than in the food processor. But, you might be able to use the processor on this anyway. I didn’t have fresh dill, unfortunately, but used some dried (never as good). I had Greek feta on hand, which is a bit less salty than some, so did add a little bit of salt. Taste it before you add the raw egg and make a decision about that yourself. I also added a few grinds of black pepper and about a tablespoon of sour cream to the mixture.They were very easy to fry – just a little bit of olive oil in a nonstick pan, and the fritters/pancakes took about 2 – 3 minutes per side, I’d say. Maybe less on the 2nd side. They were easy to turn, even though the mixture is quite soft. You don’t get little air bubbles to tell you they’re ready to turn, like you do with pancakes. Have a heated oven and hot plate standing by, so you can transfer them to keep warm while you do another batch.

Fennel, when cooked, turns into this lovely smooth texture and very mellow. But the fennel in these fritters doesn’t cook completely – there’s still a bit of crunch to it. The pancake reminded me of egg fu yung, something I haven’t seen on Chinese restaurant menus since I was a youngster. Eggy. Soft. I’ll be making this again. I had some sour cream languishing in the refrigerator, so also put a little dollop on each pancake to serve. Batul’s recipe called for a dollop of yogurt on each fritter. But, it really doesn’t need it. Really. The original recipe didn’t say how many it served. I thought maybe about 4 (leftovers, thank you), but oh well. They’re low in calorie and fat. We ate them all, except for one lone pancake. So plan accordingly. Or maybe you can have more restraint than we did.
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What fun, when you are served something that is a known quantity (green beans) and they’re cooked in an altogether different, new way. You think you know every way possible to make simple green beans. Not so. People who live around these parts (South Jersey, it’s called) are quite proprietary about their corn and tomatoes. My DH swears that he’s never tasted anything like Jersey corn and Jersey tomatoes. None, anywhere, compare to the texture and flavor he remembers from his youth. I’ve had them before when visiting here, but it was never so good as last night.

Our hosts, Meredith & Harry, served us a delicious dinner of grilled lamb, Jersey corn, Jersey tomatoes with basil, Jersey cucumbers in a sour cream sauce and Jersey green beans. Absolutely delicious, every mouthful. The corn – Jersey corn – was young ears, and beyond tender. Like melting in your mouth, almost. No butter or seasoning. Fabulous! But it’s the green beans that I went back to for seconds. Meredith told me how she made them. And excuse me, I may go grab some for breakfast. They were that good. Very, very garlicky. Hmmm. Breakfast, you say? Where’s the mouthwash?

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Files: MasterCook 5+ and MasterCook 14 (click link to open in MC – 14 contains photo)

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